#wacquant

A propósito de “Entre las cuerdas: cuadernos de aprendiz de boxeador”

El neoliberalismo se caracteriza por la gestión punitiva de sus consecuencias sociales.

Es a través de palabras que funcionan como agentes de un orden invisible como se difunden imperativos políticos presentados como destinos históricamente ineluctables y se imponen en todos los países del planeta, con la complicidad activa de muchos intelectuales, una visión del mundo que intenta reducir la política a la ética, con el afán de convertir cada agente social en un pequeño empresario de su propia vida, responsable de su éxito, y también de su fracaso y de su miseria económica, cultural y símbolica.

His life is but one long sacrifice to this science of bruising, to which he has given everything and which has given him back so little and so much at the same time.

How does a society in which every other lone mother and one child in four (over 13 million youngsters, including 10 million without any social or medical coverage) lived below the official "poverty line" in 1995 manage to convince itself that the penury that afflicts so many of its most defenseless members is a consequence of their individual failings? The answer to this query is found in the moral individualism that undergirds the national ethos and the tenacious ideology of gender and the family that makes poor unwed mothers (and fatherless children)  into abnormal, truncated, suspect beings who threaten the moral order and whom the state must therefore place under harsh tutelage.

Several features of the overhaul of public aid at century's close both mirror and complement the workings of penal institutions: the narrow aiming of state action at the bottom of the class and caste hierarchies; the built-in gender slant; the practical presumption that recipients of welfare are "guilty until proven innocent" and that their conduct must be closely supervised as well as rectified by restrictive and coercive measures; and the deployment of deterrence and stigma to achieve behavioral modification.  In the age of deregulated and underpaid labor, this law effectively assimilates welfare beneficiaries to civic felons for whom workfare will serve as an analogon of probation fit to ensure that they abide by the reaffirmed national norms of wage work and family morality, on pain of being effectively kept out of the citizenry.

Whatever the modalities of their advent, it is indisputable that the linked stinginess of the welfare wing and munificence of the penal wing under the guidance of moralism have altered the makeup of the bureaucratic field in ways that are profoundly injurious to democratic ideals. 19 As their sights converge on the same marginal populations and districts, deterrent workfare and the neutralizing prison foster vastly different profiles and experiences of citizenship across the class and ethnic spectrum. They not only contravene the fundamental principle of equality of treatment by the state and routinely abridge the individual freedoms of the dispossessed, they also undermine the consent of the governed through the aggressive deployment of involuntary programs stipulating personal responsibilities just as the state is withdrawing the institutional supports necessary to shoulder these and shirking its own social and economic charges. And they stamp the precarious fractions of the proletariat from which public aid recipients and convicts issue with the indelible seal of unworthiness. In short, the penalization of poverty splinters citizenship along class lines, saps civic trust at the bottom, and saws the degradation of republican tenets. The establishment of the new government of social insecurity discloses, in fine, that neoliberalism is constitutively corrosive of democracy.